Andrew Barry resigns

  Without a doubt, the biggest news of the month has been the resignation of RB's only programmer, Andrew Barry. On July 12 (which happens to be this writers birthday), Andrew sent this letter to the RB Mailing lists:

Dear Users,

After much consideration I have decided to submit my resignation to REAL Software. September 1st will be my last day. This was a difficult decision for me but I have decided that I need to spend more time with my girls and to pursue other projects.

I will miss working on REAL Basic, but not as much as I will miss all of the people that I have had a chance to get to know as a result. I know that all of you will wish me well, just as I wish all of you well.

Thank you for your past and continuing support of REAL Basic.

Best Wishes
Andrew

  After much discussion on the lists, REAL SW attempted to calm fears with this letter:

I'm sure all of you were surprised to hear of Andrew's resignation and are wondering what this means for the future of REALbasic. First, let me reassure you that REAL Software will continue to sell, support and develop REALbasic and to do our part to help the REALbasic community survive and thrive. We are more committed to this now than ever before.

It was our intention from the beginning to build an engineering team. This process had already begun and will continue. A team allows the distribution of responsibilities and speeds development. This is especially true for a product like REALbasic that is so internally modular. The original plan was for Andrew to head this team and continue to be responsible for its direction. That part of the plan will, of course, be changing. Andrew and I recently outlined versions 2.1, 2.5 and 3.0 of REALbasic so his original vision for what REALbasic would become is intact. And as we have done in the past, we will continue to ask each of you for your input so that REALbasic will continue to be what you want it to be.

REAL Software is financially healthy. We are a privately held company so I won't go into the details. However, we were profitable last year (with only half a year of sales and a years worth of expenses) and we are even more profitable this year and are debt free. We run a pretty tight ship here and as a result, have the financial resources to put a new engineering team into place.

Andrew's last day at REAL Software will be September 1st, 1999 which is the date we are planning to ship REALbasic 2.1. The goal of this release will be to improve reliability and to finish existing features that are not supported by the Windows compiler. It is important to us that each of you feel that REALbasic is strong and solid.

All of us here at REAL Software wish Andrew well in his next endeavor.

Geoff Perlman
President and CEO
REAL Software, Inc.

  This undoubtedly will mean some major changes in RB. However, we all wish Andrew Barry the best and commend him for his years of singlehanded work on CrossBasic and REALbasic.

e-CryptIt ecrypts more

  Einhuger Software's 5-star e-CryptIt product has had several revisions. It now supports binhex, base64, MacBinary, and UUencode. As usual, it's available free to registered Einhugur users on Bjorn's site.

Many More Menu Methods March In

  Marca Tatem has released a new module for manipulating menus in RB. MD MenuMethods allows you to set keyboard equivalents to anything (including things like Cmd-Opt-Delete) at runtime and allows you to make a WYSIWYG font menu.

RB Stationary

  Although most people don't know it, RB supports stationary! If you make a project into a stationary file, you can doubleclick it to open up RB with various items that you use in most of your projects. Sascha Leib has created a stationary file that includes support for a variety of things, including multiple documents, printing, preferences, strings in 13 (!) different languages, and much more. It's available at http://www.tietovalta.fi/~sascha/rb/.

Mailing List Archive

  The RB-NUG list has had an archive for almost its entire life (over two years). However, the DR list hasn't had this luxury—until now. Nathaniel Irons has set up a completely searchable archive with all the posts from the NUG, DR, and even the plugins list. A sherlock plugin is also available. Check it out at http://bumppo.net/lists/rb.html.

httpSocket update

  httpSocket, a five-star product, has been updated to version 2.0. This version is a complete rewrite of 1.8. 2.0 is more efficient, quicker, and has numerous bug fixes. Other new features include support for methods other than GET and POST, better support for code-instantiated sockets, as well as resumable downloads. httpSocket can be downloaded from www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/rb/ as well as the RB Café.

TBFinder finds FSpOpenRF

  Fabian Lidmann has released TBFinder, a program to assist in converting toolbox calls to RB Code. Read our cover story for more on this tool.

Lingo2 speaks in double the tongues

  Lingo2 is a humongous update (a rewrite in fact) of LingoScript. This module allows projects to run user-defined scripts. This could be used to add macro support, provide a scripting language, or even to allow more powerful plugins. This version fixes tons of bugs from LingoScript and is significantly faster as well. It's available at www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/rb/

REALbasic wins an award!

  In this year's Apple Design awards, REALbasic 1.0 won the grand prize for best new product and was the runner up in both the Best Macintosh User Experience and Most Innovative categories. Congrats RB!

SpiniVector Spins Spiffily

  SpiniVector is a large update to MiniVector, a vector image editor. SpiniVector adds support for polygons, beziers, rotating, and a whole lot more. Check it out at www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/rb/

AE Works

  AEWorks is a program that allows you to create aete resources for your programs. As last month's cover story explained, these allow applications to be AppleScriptable. I suggest using this if you don't have Resorcerer. It can be downloaded from this site.

Cell Alignments

  A new feature in 2.1a2 is the ability to justify text in the cells of a listbox. For example, ListBox.ColumnAlignment(0)=2 would center all the items in the first column of a list box. You can also offset text by a specific number of pixels, as well as aligning it around a decimal point.

Picture Masks!

  A long time ago, pictures in RB just couldn't have any type of transparency. As you might think, this caused a lot of frustration. REAL SW added the Transparent property, and everyone was happy for a while. Now, they've added full fledged support for masks.

  To access a mask, create a new picture from code using NewPicture. Its bit depth MUST be 32. After this, you can use all the normal drawing commands on the mask with Picture.Mask.Graphics. You can't directly set the mask, but you can use a DrawPicture command to draw a picture into it. As a bonus, the masks aren't just the standard 1-bit variety–they're full -fledged 8-bit alpha channels!

Push I tell you!

  A new feature in 2.1a1 was the Push method for pushbuttons. When you call this, it visually pushes the button and then calls its Action event. This is very useful.

Version Jumps

    Here are all of the updates to RB since last issue. Almost all of them have been very dull and very minor. Bug fixes and Win32 improvements are about it. Bold version numbers indicate an official release.
Version Date Summary
2.1a17 8/13 Two bug fixes and two Win32 improvements...
2.1a16 8/12 Two bugs fixed
2.1a15 8/11 A (note the singular form) Win32 improvement
2.1a14 8/4 Win32 improvement and a bug fix (just like every other dull release...)
2.1a13 8/2 Win32 improvements
2.1a12 7/29 Bug Fix & Win32 improvements
2.1a11 7/19 Bug Fixes
Win32 improvements
2.1a10 7/16 Bug Fixes
2.1a9 7/15 Bug Fixes
2.1a8 7/13 Bug Fixes
2.1a7 7/12 Database Improvements
2.1a6 7/9 PlayLooping and Stop methods for sounds
Win32 keyboard shortcuts implemented.
2.1a5 7/6 Bug Fixes.
2.1a4 6/30 Bug Fixes
2.1a3 6/28 Bug Fixes.
2.1a2 6/25 CellAlignment for ListBoxes
2.1a1 6/24 Changed to 2.1 because of incompatible new file format.
MacVRefNum and MacDirID for folderitems
Bug Fixes
2.0.3a4 6/17 Mask property for pictures
MacWindowPtr property
2.0.3a3 6/15 ParseDate Method
DragItem improvements
Bug Fixes
2.0.3a2 6/10 New EditableMovie features
QTGraphicsExporter class
SoundFormat class
2.0.3a1 6/8 Push method for buttons
Bug Fixes
2.0.2   Bug Fixes
2.0.2a9 5/26 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a8 5/26 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a7 5/25 Icons for menus
Bug Fixes
2.0.2a6 5/24 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a5 5/21 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a4 5/6 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a3 5/4 Bug Fixes
2.0.2a2 5/3 Bug Fixes